Articles by moezilla

Reports are surfacing of a Facebook-backed smartphone running Google’s Android system, built by INQ (who also manufactures a phone for Skype). GigaOm’s Om Malik says he’s been aware of the project “for…

British researchers have reached a startling conclusion. Unless online shoppers order 25 items at a time, they’re polluting more than if they shopped at their local mall. And telecommuting was actually found…

An online music site has raised over $68,000 to hire a full orchestra to record royalty-free classical music. (“Although the actual symphonies are long out of copyright, there is separate protection for…

In the Central African Republic, broadband internet service costs 3891% of the average monthly income. Put another way, a month’s broadband service costs more than three years’ average wages in the country,”…

A British lawyer’s firm sent thousands of letters demanding £500 ($800) damage payments over filesharing, based on IP addresses obtained from ISPs. But now England’s Solicitors Regulation Authority is referring that lawyer…

MoeZilla writes: Fans waited in line for two hours to claim a California baseball stadium’s 1,250 bobblehead dolls representing the two candidates vying to replace Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. But “when the wacky…

AT&T and Verizon are testing a new feature designed to “supplant more than 1 billion plastic cards in American wallets” – by letting people make traditional credit card purchases using their cellphones!…

Here’s some fun “real-life favorite stories” from Kindle users. (My favorite one was the 5-year-old’s “iPad” comment.) But one Kindle user also reports on a startling development from her recent trip to…

A biographer of Benjamin Franklin fielded an interesting question at a Smithsonian Institution symposium. If he were alive today, would Ben Franklin be a blogger? Walter Isaacson, once Time magazine’s managing editor…

There’s a glaring but very funny mistake in Amazon’s free digital edition of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The first paragraph adds the word “tush” (instead of “tusk”) to the poem “Night song of the Jungle.” In the poem “tush” now becomes part of the “hour of pride and power.”

More than four years later, Google now finds over 2,500 sites quoting the “tush” version of Kipling’s poem, including several universities and even the Encyclopedia Britannica! A misguided human resources document even quoted the “tush” version of the poem – then added it “could very well be a guide in defining and understanding organizations.” Tush-friendly organizations are described by the HR document as places that include “unwritten codes and culture,” and adhering to them “determines one’s chances of survival…”

But the typo ultimately proves the value of “crowdsourcing,” since the free etext has recently become one of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks, which is what led to the discovery of the typo, in a kind of “spontaneous collaboration” which will help preserve a story that was written more than 100 years ago.

The legendary editor behind Mondo 2000 magazine reveals how LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and a high school underground newspaper all fermented into High Frontiers, Reality Hackers and eventually his famous cyberculture publication as…

The transhumanist convening the first “Open Science Summit” at Harvard urges us to free “our scientific and technological commons” and enable “a new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve our greatest…

Their new study identifies a genetic “switch” for the cluster of learning and memory genes which cause memory impairment in aging mice. By injecting an enzyme, the team “flipped” the switch to its on position for older mice, giving them the memory and learning performance they’d enjoyed when they were young.

Israel has quietly become a world leader in robotic weaponry. After deploying the first unmanned aircraft in 1981, Israel developed unmanned ground vehicles and speedboats, and even border guard robo-snipers and camouflaged…

Alex Lightman was the CTO for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Organization. Now he compares the NASA Mission Control room to Caesars Palace Race and Sports Book, and asks whether we…